When a tree falls in the city
Jeff Derksen’s new poems consider work, human rights and what it means when an urban tree is cut down.
April 08th, 2025
Jeff Derksen splits his time between Vancouver and Vienna, Austria. Photo Sabine Bitter
While early influences include Pat Lowther, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, Derksen now looks to his current communities of writers and artists more than any one individual writer.
Born and raised in New Westminster, Jeff Derksen received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1991 for his first poetry collection, Down Time (Talonbooks, 1990). He has long been associated with the Vancouver writers collective, the Kootenay School of Writing and was a research Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at City University of New York before joining Simon Fraser University, where he is now a professor in the English Department. BC BookWorld’s Beverly Cramp interviewed Derksen upon the release of his eighth poetry book, Future Works (Talonbooks $18.95).—Ed.
*
BC Bookworld: When did you start writing poetry and how would you describe your early poems?
Jeff Derksen: After high school in New Westminster, I started writing poetry when I was at Douglas College (and working at the Shell self-serve gas station across the street) and was lucky enough to get into a creative writing course with Leona Gom. My very early poems were shaped by (or were bad imitations of) Pat Lowther, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje and CanLit of the late seventies. Later, when I went to the fabulous David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, I worked with Fred Wah, Pauline Butling, Tom Wayman, Colin Browne and Sean Virgo so I picked up on influences, which were pretty varied, from them, like the New American poetry, working-class writers, the poetics of place, Asian-Canadian writers, etc.
BCBW: What were your early themes and have they changed?
JD: I had travelled in Latin America at that point and the liberation struggle in Nicaragua was going on, so no doubt I wrote about that naively. In Vancouver there was the cultural hub of La Quena on Commercial Drive, so those politics were in the air. The poetry of witness, as Carolyn Forché called it, was a model to think through the larger political moment and solidarities. Living on the Drive in the mid-eighties was really dynamic and I was influenced by the speed of changes in everyday life and by the young writers and artists in the city. So, themes like the city and work, and the contradictions in everyday life started to shape my poetry. These are things I still write about, but the stakes feel greater today.
BCBW: You are also involved in the visual arts community. How does that intersect with your written poetry?
JD: In any of the cities I’ve lived in—Vancouver, Nelson, Calgary, New York, and Vienna (Austria)—I’ve always been part of those two communities—artists and writers—and that sparked a lot of friendships and collaborations. I will say that, of any of those cities, Vancouver has, in my experience, the strongest connections between poetry and art. Being part of two communities in that way, I’ve never felt like an isolated or solo poet and the ideas and dynamics of contemporary art have definitely shaped how I write poetry and how I think about poetry in the world. For me, it has been communities of writers and artists and others who have influenced my work, more than an individual writer.
BCBW: How did Future Works come into being?
JD: Future Works took more than ten years to put together as I worked collaboratively on projects in the visual arts with a group we formed, Urban Subjects. For 5 years, I was dean of Graduate Studies at SFU because I believe in the possibilities of universities and students—during that time I found it difficult to write poetry for a bunch of tedious reasons. But that time lag, in a sense, put me in a reflective place and so Future Works works forward through the past decade with the new social movements that took shape, how work changed, how Covid left an impact, how cities and everyday life changed, and how time changed. The book looks ahead to a different future, one where notions of mutual aid expand.
BCBW: There are many historical references, some personal (In Memory of My Heavy Metal Year) and some more political (Living Through Aluminum). Do you separate the personal from the political? If not, why not?
Jeff Derksen with Vancouver’s Stanley Park and English Bay in the background. Photo Sabine Bitter
JD: Yes, Future Works does wrestle with the near past and the ways the personal and the political are braided together. I think poetry can very powerfully look at the effects of that braiding—in how that happens, how it affects us, and what it might spur us to do. I think the political aspects of poetry can be surprising, energizing and filled with a kind of joy and it can lead you to think in a different manner, to think through something in a new light.
BCBW: One whole section of Future Works is about trees, urban trees in particular. Do you believe people have the right to legal standing any more so than trees or other animals?
JD: I started the Urban Trees poems because from our balcony I saw the trees in Stanley Park (still an odd name for a park on unceded Indigenous territory) being cut down. Despite the city justifying this culling with the health of the trees and the safety of the park, etc., areas that homeless folks use during the day or sleep at night—mostly in the summer—were cleared, so it seemed to me that the clearing of trees is also about clearing homeless folks out of the park. So, the rights of trees and the rights of people are tied together. You see this tragically in cities and areas that are being bombed, such as Kyiv and Gaza. Do trees also have the right to not be bombed? Trees help bombed cities and people recover. In the urban tree poems (and other poems in the book), I am trying to think through the horrible contradiction of how human rights create exclusions and inclusions. Particularly at this moment in history when so many people are excluded! Trees add an incredible amount to city life and they need their own rights, otherwise they will be managed as a nuisance or as timber. Visiting various cities – from Dresden to Cairo — and talking to folks about trees, there is an incredible amount of love for urban trees and that love is also tied up with how we want our cities and our lives to be. Poetry felt like a good way to get at that!
BCBW: Looking back at the early dreams of your youth, and whether or not they have been realized to any great degree, would you say you are optimistic about the future?
JD: Being from the working class, the dreams of my youth, I think, were narrowly pragmatic, such as to have a job and one I liked! Poetry opened up a world for me, led me to universities where I had a great experience and to a job I like—so pretty good on that front! On a day like to today, where the news is filled with a tanking world economy and forms of hatred as governmentality, optimism has to be historically grounded. Working with students, particularly graduate students and Indigenous students, and being involved in some movements around housing and urban rights, generates a very future-oriented optimism that I feel a part of. I hope Future Works shows that.
9781772016284
This interview will be edited for space and published in the 2025 Summer issue of BC BookWorld, due out in June.
Leave a Reply